Jessica Jones Protagonist
The case study above focused on two American television shows produced in Hollywood, but the female detective as protagonist seems to be a popular trend across most of the western world. Currently, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom has popular drama series with female protagonists, many of them highly regarded by national and international critics alike. In America, there are also other shows to support this current trend of female detectives. Some of them follow the more supernatural strand like iZombie, while others are based on more real-life situations, as was most common in traditional crime drama. Jessica Jones (2015-) fits in the supernatural category, as the female protagonist, Jessica, is a former superhero who is mind-controlled
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Jessica is an even darker and more isolated character than Liv and Veronica, and very few relationships define her, as her trust issues are a constant hindrance. Jessica Jones is already highly regarded among television critics, and the first season gained top ratings of A’s and B’s from The AV Club (Sava, 2015), as well as a high 8.3 out of ten viewer rating on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB.com, 2016). The fact that Jessica Jones is also a show whose narrative premise is supernatural, thus very untraditional, points to a trend in American female detective shows where narrative complexity helps convey a new female image in television. Collectively, the American shows represent an alternative to a traditional ‘women in the workplace’ narrative. The workplaces represented in both Veronica Mars, iZombie and Jessica Jones are determined by the characters and their actions, i.e. Veronica’s high school grounds, Liv’s hallucinations and Jessica’s private business set up in her home. None of these environments are traditional to a placement of women and they allow for very little interference from outsiders because of their personal
Jessica is an even darker and more isolated character than Liv and Veronica, and very few relationships define her, as her trust issues are a constant hindrance. Jessica Jones is already highly regarded among television critics, and the first season gained top ratings of A’s and B’s from The AV Club (Sava, 2015), as well as a high 8.3 out of ten viewer rating on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB.com, 2016). The fact that Jessica Jones is also a show whose narrative premise is supernatural, thus very untraditional, points to a trend in American female detective shows where narrative complexity helps convey a new female image in television. Collectively, the American shows represent an alternative to a traditional ‘women in the workplace’ narrative. The workplaces represented in both Veronica Mars, iZombie and Jessica Jones are determined by the characters and their actions, i.e. Veronica’s high school grounds, Liv’s hallucinations and Jessica’s private business set up in her home. None of these environments are traditional to a placement of women and they allow for very little interference from outsiders because of their personal